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A ‘Sudanese Genocide’ in Egypt?

The current tensions in Egypt between the Muslim Brotherhood-led government and a fragmented populace that includes large segments of people who oppose the Islamization of Egypt—the moderates, secularists, and Christians who recently demonstrated in mass at Tahrir Square and even besieged the presidential palace—is all too familiar. One need only look to Egypt’s immediate neighbor, Sudan, and its bloody history, to know where the former may be headed.

The civil war in Sudan, which saw the deaths of millions, was fundamentally a byproduct of an Islamist regime trying to push Sharia law on large groups of Sudanese—Muslim, Christian, and polytheist—who refused to be governed by Allah’s law, who refused to be Islamized. Although paying lip-service to pluralism and equality in the early years, by 1992, the Islamist government of Khartoum declared a formal jihad on the south and the Nuba, citing a fatwa by Sudan’s Muslim authorities which declared that “An insurgent who was previously a Muslim is now an apostate; and a non-Muslim is a non-believer standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam, and Islam has granted the freedom of killing both of them.”

In other words, Khartoum decreed that: 1) It is simply trying to do Allah’s will by instituting Islamic Sharia law; 2) Any Sudanese who objects—including Muslims—is obviously an infidel; 3) All such infidels must be eliminated. Accordingly, countless people were butchered, raped, and enslaved—all things legitimate once an Islamic states declares a jihad. While South Sudan recently ceded, the Nuba Mountains in the north is still continuously being bombarded.

Now consider how the above pattern—false promises of religious freedom, followed by a Sharia push and a declaration that anyone opposing it, including Muslims, are infidels and apostates to be killed—is precisely what has been going on directly to the north of Sudan, in Egypt.

First, although Muhammad Morsi repeatedly promised that he would be a president who represents “all Egyptians” during presidential elections, mere months after coming to power, he showed that his true interest—which should have been obvious from the start, considering that he is a Muslim Brotherhood leader—was to Sharia and Islamization.

Even so, Egyptians did not forget that Morsi, during presidential elections, had said the following in a video interview:

The Egyptian people are awake and alert—Muslims and Christians; and they know that, whoever comes [to become Egypt’s president], and does not respect the rule of law and the Constitution, the people will go against him. I want the people immediately to go against me, if I ever do not respect the law and Constitution.

Accordingly, when Morsi aggrandized himself with unprecedented presidential powers, and then used these powers to sidestep the law and push a Sharia-heavy Constitution on Egypt, large segments of the Egyptian people did rise against him; at one point, he even had to flee the presidential palace.

And just as in Sudan, Morsi’s Islamist allies—who, like Morsi, during elections spoke glowingly of Egyptian unity—made it a point to portray all those Egyptians opposing Morsi, the majority of whom were Muslims, of opposing Islam, of being apostates and hypocrites, and thus enemies who should be fought and killed.